I stumbled onto Vizify the other day via Twitter and just spent a few minutes checking it out today.

After creating an account by syncing your social media sites, Vizify will auto-generate a mini-website that compiles content and data from your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Foursquare feeds and then transform them into a series of nifty visual online representations.

Share buttons are fine, but I wish there was a way to embed the video. To watch it, click on either the link above or the image below. Then, go make one of your own! Feel free to share it with me on Twitter (@almacy). I would love to see it.

Evidently, a user was attempting to tweet out a link to a cover image of the upcoming November 11, 2013 edition of The New Yorker magazine. I was on my mobile phone at the time and was intrigued when a warning popped up after I attempted to click the link.

What was your favorite moment of 2012? So much happens each year that we often forget to take time to reflect in the moment.

As we embark upon 2013, Jeremiah Warren has pulled together a short video on YouTube looking back on some of the past year’s highlights including events in the Middle East, London Olympics, 2012 presidential election, NASA, Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilms, the Pope’s first tweet, Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, the Mayans and several memorial tweets remembering those we lost.

This year, we will all witness and likely participate in the 2012 U.S. presidential election in an unprecedented manner thanks to social media and rapidly emerging technology. Not only are the campaigns and mainstream media using these tools, but voters will also have unique opportunities that will help inform their vote on Election Day come November. Here are five ways that digital media is changing the modern political environment in the U.S.:

As delegates make their way to Tampa, Florida next week for the 2012 Republican National Convention, staff and volunteers are working diligently to ensure that all Americans can participate — whether in person or remotely. Thanks to advanced technology through partnerships with AT&T, Microsoft and Google along with social media use among participants and viewers alike, they can!

According to a recent video released by convention organizers as part of their “Convention Insider” series, the goal is to make this the “most open and accessible event of its kind.”

The Edelman Global Public Affairs team has released findings from the 2011 Capital Staffers Index, an annual global study that analyzes top trends in global public affairs and communications.

This year’s expanded report is the third annual survey based on interviews with over 500 senior staffers (legislative directors and above) from capital cities in 11 different countries around the world including Washington DC, Brussels, London, Beijing, Ottawa, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, New Delhi, Buenos Aires and Brasilia.

Although traditional methods public affairs components are still valuable, social media channels have experienced a meteoric rise in their ability to shape and influence policy worldwide over the past year.

This week, Edelman released TweetLevel, the latest web-based tool designed to measure one’s “importance” on Twitter.

For those who haven’t given in to peer pressure to join the site yet, Twitter is a “microblog” that enables users to share thoughts, activities and news via 140 character text updates.

Twitter’s founders had a pretty basic, yet novel idea. They wanted to create a platform where users could connect with each other online to answer one simple question, “What are you doing?”

I’ll admit that when I first joined (@almacy), I just didn’t get it. Besides a few close family members and friends, I remember thinking, “Who really cares what I’m doing?” In fact, my first tweet isn’t exactly going to assist in solving global strife.

This past weekend, the Associated Press reported that the White House was moving to an open source content management system (CMS) known as Drupal. Many among the tech set have praised the move including Nancy Scola from techPresident who was among the first to write about the change in her post, WhiteHouse.gov goes Drupal. A good read.

For those not familiar with what this actually means, a CMS is basically the back-end (not visible to visitors) of a website that allows the administrators (owners) of the site — often non-programmers — to easily organize site navigation and add content designed to appear on the front-end.

For most CMS solutions, the user experience is pretty simple, usually consisting of a password protected login, options for varied user permissions for approval and forms with specific fields based on type of content such as text, photos, audio and video. Once entered and saved, the CMS stores the information in the back-end database and displays the content on the front-end when called up by a site visitor.

From Moldova to Motrin Moms, Twitter has become the arena of coordinated, widespread revolution several times over the last year. Still, when we look back on how the microblogging platform has evolved into a low-barrier tool for grassroots organizing, these will only be footnotes to the events of the last few days in Tehran. As protestors took to the streets of Iran to voice their discontent with the 2009 presidential election results, people from around the world were attentively watching updates from the ground on Twitter, long before hearing reports from any major news outlets.

The collection of status updates on Twitter provided the world an inside look on the dire situation within Iran from firsthand accounts, each message deeply personal and compelling to a worldwide audience. But when the masses turned to their favorite cable news network for more information, they were met with Mike Huckabee talking about credit cards or other irrelevant programming. With no recognizable coverage in mainstream media as events unfolded, it led users to cry foul on the news networks, demanding more information than 140 characters could deliver.